Odroid-C1+

ODROID-C1+

The ODROID-C1+ is esteemed to be the most powerful low-cost single board computer available, as well as being an extremely versatile device. Featuring a quad-core Amlogic processor, advanced Mali GPU, and Gigabit Ethernet, it can function as a home theater set-top box, a general purpose computer for web browsing, gaming and socializing, a compact tool for college or office work, a prototyping device for hardware tinkering, a controller for home automation, a workstation for software development, and much more.

Some of the modern operating systems that run on the ODROID-C1+ are Ubuntu, Android, Fedora, ARCHLinux, Debian, and OpenELEC, with thousands of free open-source software packages available. The ODROID-C1+ is an ARM device -- the most widely used architecture for mobile devices and embedded 32-bit computing. The ARM processor’s small size, reduced complexity and low power consumption makes it very suitable for miniaturized devices such as wearables and embedded controllers.

NB: Because of the above changes, the original cases and heat sinks are not compatible.

Here is the comparisons to give you better understanding of ODROID-C1.

ODROID-C1 vs Raspberry Pi2

Both are Linux-friendly, $35 ARM® single-board computers for various applications and purposes.

Hardware Comparison

The ODROID-C1 has many advantages over the Raspberry Pi. The processor is an S805 1.5GHz Quad-core from Amlogic with 1GByte DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and IR-receiver. The size of this computer is still only 85 x 56 mm with a weight of 40g, and offers silent operation, 2~3W average power usage, and instant portability, since it fits in a shirt pocket.

One powerful feature of the ODROID-C1 is the row of GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins along the edge of the device. These pins are a physical interface between the board and the outside world. The 40pin interface header includes SPI, I2C, UART, ADC and GPIO function.

An SD 3.01 standard compatible UHS-1 Micro-SD card, as well as the faster eMMC module, can be ordered with the ODROID-C1, and arrives with the popular Ubuntu operating system already installed. Insert the SD card into the slot, connect a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, Ethernet and power cable, and that’s all you need to do to use the ODROID-C1! Browse the web, play games, run office programs, edit photos, develop software, and watch videos right away.

The RTC, IR receiver and ADC features on the ODROID-C1 offer many options for building great DIY projects

We ran a simple, popular benchmark called Unix-Bench, SysBench and N-Bench to compare the performance of the two boards. Tests were done using several manufacturer-provided images based on a clean install, and the “apt-get update && apt-get upgrade” commands were first run to ensure that both boards was up-to-date.

The RPi2 was clocked at 900Mhz using a Sandisk UHS-1 8GB SDCard running the Raspbian OS. The C1 was clocked at 1.5Ghz using an 16GB eMMC with Ubuntu 14.04 OS. Both units were powered by a 5V/2A power supply and connected to the 1920x1080 HDMI output.

Benchmarks(Index Score)

ODROID-C1

Raspberry Pi 2

Ratio

Dhrystone-2

1262.8

1006.6

1.25

Double-Precision Whetstone (x3)

1318.8

1076.1

1.23

Nbench2.2.3 Integer ( x40)

1208.0

840.0

1.44

Nbench2.2.3

1050.0

809.0

1.30

SysBench CPU ( 1/T * 50000)

863.6

669.3

1.29

SysBench RAM

998.3

574.7

1.74

The results show that the CPU computing benchmark is about 30% faster on the C1 and RAM memory access speed is about 75% faster on the C1.
Note that above benchmark scores were converted to make an easier comparison.

Storage I/O comparison

To obtain the results in the storage I/O comparison graph, type the following lines at a command prompt. The first command tests the write speed, and the second command tests the read speed:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.tmp oflag=direct bs=500K count=1024

$ dd if=test.tmp of=/dev/null iflag=direct bs=500K count=1024

Media access performance

RPi2 Model B

ODROID - C1

eMMC Read (MB/s)

NA

62.2

eMMC Write (MB/s)

NA

25.1

MicroSD UHS-1 Read (MB/s)

19.2

32.5

MicroSD UHS-1 Write (MB/s)

13.1

14.2

If you use the eMMC storage, you can get about two to three times faster storage I/O read performance. However, an affordable microSD UHS-1 card can still achieve reasonably fast speeds thanks to the advanced SD 3.01 host controller in the S805 processor. The MicroSD card read performance on C1 is still about 1.7 times faster then RPi if you use the UHS-1 memory card.

Ethernet IO comparison

To replicate the results in the Ethernet comparison graph, type the following lines at a command prompt:
Server agent on the C1 and Client agent on the host PCruppi@ruppi-desktop:~$ iperf -s 192.168.2.10 -P 10
[SUM] 0.0-10.1 sec 1.10 GBytes 928 Mbits/sec

Thanks to the Gigabit Ethernet available on the ODROID-C1, the network performance of C1 is an impressive six to nine times faster than Raspberry Pi.

As one can see from the testing results, the quad-core 1.5GHz ODROID-C1 can easily outperform the Raspberry Pi 2 board. Many test results show about 140% more performance from the ODROID-C1 platform. Even though both platforms are Linux-friendly computing devices, the performance to cost ratio is much higher with the ODROID-C1. If you are considering a tiny computer for general purpose computing, software development, or as a project platform, the ODROID-C1 will give you a lot more satisfaction and fun with incredible performance for a very low price.